A Great And Terrible Beauty (15 page)

“Would you allow me to finish, please?” Felicity growls.

“. . . and we felt it, too. We carried our small bit of magic inside us, across the veil into this world. Our first attempt came at dinner. Sarah gazed at her measly soup and bread, closed her eyes and pronounced it pheasant. And so it appeared to be, and tasted of it too, every bite. So good was it that Sarah smiled heartily afterward and said, ‘I want more.’”

I’m so lost in thought that I don’t realize Felicity has stopped reading. It’s quiet except for the sound of water trickling down a wall. “Wherever did you find this?” She’s looking at me as if I were a criminal.

Why, a ghostly urchin led me to it in the night. Doesn’t that ever happen to you?

“The library,” I lie.

“And did you really think it was an actual account of the witching hour at Spence?” Felicity is looking at me in a bemused way.

“No, of course not,” I lie. “I was only having a bit of fun with you.”

“Oooh, the witching hour of the Order. Is that just before vespers or right after music?” Pippa is giggling so hard, she snorts like a horse. It is most unattractive, and I am just horrible enough to take great pleasure in this fact.

“Very clever—you’re quite a wit,” I say, trying to sound good-humored when I feel surly and humiliated.

Felicity holds the diary aloft in mock seriousness. “I have been opened, my sisters. From now on, this shall be our sacred tome. Let us begin every meeting with a reading from this compelling”—she glances my way—”and absolutely true diary.”

This sends Pippa howling. “I think that’s a splendid idea!” She slurs the word so that it comes out
splendlid.

“Wait a moment, that’s mine,” I say, reaching for the diary, but Felicity pockets it.

“I thought you said it came from the library,” Ann says.

“Ha! Well done, Ann.” Pippa smiles at her and I’m already regretting the beginning of their friendship. My lie has stuck me here, without the book and a way to understand what’s happening to me, what my visions may mean. But there’s no getting hold of it without telling them the whole truth, and I’m not ready to do that. Not until I understand it myself.

Ann passes the bottle to me again but I wave it away.

“Je ne voudrais pas le whiskey,”
I slur in my terrible French-English.

“We’ve got to help you with your French, Gemma, before LeFarge bumps you down in the ranks,” Felicity says.

“How do
you
know so much about French?” I ask, irritated.

“For your information, Miss Doyle, my mother happens to run a very famous salon in Paris.” She gives
salon
the French pronunciation. “All the best writers in Europe have been entertained by my mother.”

“Your mother is French?” I ask. My thoughts are a bit foggy from the whiskey. Everything makes me want to giggle.

“No. She’s English. Descended from the Yorks. She lives in Paris.”

Why would she live in Paris instead of here, where her husband would return after his duty to Her Majesty had been completed? “Don’t your parents live together?”

Felicity glares at me. “My father is away at sea most of the time. My mother is a beautiful woman. Why shouldn’t she have the companionship of friends in Paris?”

I don’t know what I’ve said wrong. I start to apologize but Pippa runs right over me.

“I wish my mother ran a salon. Or did anything interesting. All she seems to do is drive me mad with her criticism. ‘Pippa—mustn’t slouch. You’ll never get a husband that way.’ ‘Pippa, we must keep up appearances at all times.’ ‘Pippa, what you think of yourself isn’t nearly as important as what others say of you.’ And there’s her latest protégé—the clumsy, charmless Mr. Bumble.”

“Who is Mr. Bumble?” I ask.

“Pippa’s paramour,” Felicity says, drawing out the word.

“He is
not
my paramour!” Pippa screeches.

“No, but he wants to be. Why else would he keep paying his visits?”

“He must be fifty if he’s a day!”

“And very rich or your mother wouldn’t be throwing him at you.”

“Mother lives for money.” Pippa sighs. “She doesn’t like the way Father gambles. She’s afraid he’s going to lose all our money. That’s why she’s so desperate to marry me off to a wealthy man.”

“She’ll probably find you someone with a clubfoot and twelve children, all older than you are.” Felicity laughs.

Pippa shudders. “You should see some of the men she’s paraded in front of me. One was four feet tall!”

“You can’t be serious!” I say.

“Well, he might have been five feet.” Pippa laughs and it’s contagious, sending us all into hysterical fits. “Another time, she introduced me to a man who kept pinching my bottom when we were dancing. Can you imagine? ‘Oh, lovely waltz.’ Pinch, pinch. ‘Shall we have some punch?’ Pinch, pinch. I was bruised for a week.”

Our shrieks are animal sounds, loose and rambunctious. They die down to coughing and murmurs, and Pippa says, “Ann, Gemma. You don’t have to worry about such things as impossible mothers trying to control your every waking moment. How lucky you are.”

All the breath leaves my lungs. Felicity kicks Pippa hard in the shin.

“Well, that wasn’t very nice, was it?” Pippa makes a show of rubbing her leg.

“Don’t be so touchy,” Felicity says snidely, but when she catches my eyes, there’s a hint of kindness there and I understand she’s done it for me, and I wonder for the first time if we really might be friends.

“How revolting!” Ann has been flipping through the diary. She’s got some sort of illustration in her hands, which she tosses away as if it might burn her.

“What is it?” Pippa rushes over, her curiosity stronger than her pride. We lean in close. It’s a drawing of a woman with grapes in her hair coupling with a man in animal skins, a mask with horns adorning his head. The caption reads,
The Rites of Spring by Sarah Rees-Toome.

We all gasp and call it disgusting while trying to get a better look.

“Methinks he’s already sprung,” I say, giggling in a high voice I don’t even recognize as my own.

“What are they doing?” Ann asks, turning quickly away.

“She’s lying back and thinking of England!” Pippa shrieks, invoking the phrase that every English mother tells her daughter about carnal acts. We’re not supposed to enjoy it. We’re just supposed to put our mind on making babies for the future of the Empire and to please our husbands. For some reason, it’s Kartik’s face that swims inside my eyes. Those heavily fringed orbs of his coming closer, making my lips part. A strange warmth starts in my belly and seeps under every edge of me.

“Ann, don’t tell me you don’t know what men and women do when they’re together. Shall I show you?” Felicity slithers off the rock and drags herself along the ground with her hands, leaning close to Ann, who recoils, her back against the cave wall.

“No, thank you,” she whispers.

Felicity holds her gaze for a moment, then licks Ann’s cheek in one long stroke. Horrified, Ann wipes at herself. Felicity only laughs and falls back against a low rock, stretching her arms over her head. Her full breasts strain at the bodice of her gown. She stares at a point beyond our heads. “I’m going to have many men.” She says this matter-of-factly, as if commenting on the weather, but she has to know she’s being scandalous.

Pippa doesn’t know whether to gasp or giggle so she does both. “Felicity, that’s shocking!”

Felicity smells blood. She’s on the scent of our discomfort and won’t let go. “I am. Hordes of men! Members of Parliament and stable boys. Moors and Irishmen. Disgraced dukes! Kings!”

Pippa has her hands over her ears. “No!” she screams. “Don’t tell me any more!” But she’s laughing, too. She loves Felicity’s brazenness.

Felicity is up, dancing, throwing herself around like a whirling dervish. “I’m going to have presidents and captains of industry! Actors and Gypsies! Poets and artists and men who will die just to touch the hem of my dress!”

“You forgot princes!” Ann shouts, giving a small, guilty smile.

“Princes!” Felicity shouts with glee. She takes Ann’s hands, dances her around in circles, Felicity’s blond hair whipping at the air.

Pippa is up, joining the circle. “And troubadours!”

“And troubadours who sing about the sapphires of my eyes!”

I’m joining them, caught up in the swirl of it all. “Don’t forget jugglers and acrobats and admirals!”

Felicity stops. Her voice is cold. “No. No admirals.”

“I’m sorry, Felicity. I didn’t mean anything by it,” I say, straightening my dress while Pippa and Ann stare awkwardly at their feet. The silence is raw electricity between us all—one touch, one wrong word and we’ll burn up. The bottle is in Felicity’s hand. She takes a long, hard draw on it, doubles over from the force of the whiskey and rakes the back of her pale hand across her lips, dark with drink.

“Let’s have a ritual, shall we?”

“Wh-wh-what sort of r-r-ritual?” Ann doesn’t realize that she’s taken a few steps away from us, toward the yawning mouth of the cave.

“I know—we could make up an oath!” Pippa is rather pleased with herself.

“It needs to be more binding than that,” Felicity says, her eyes faraway. “Promises can be forgotten. Let’s do a blood ritual. We need something sharp.” Her eyes fall even with my amulet, which is hanging free. “That would do nicely, I think.”

Instinctively, my hand goes to it. “What are you going to do?”

Felicity exhales, rolling her eyes dramatically. “I’m going to eviscerate you and leave your organs on a pike in the yard as a warning to those who wear large jewelry.”

“It was my mother’s,” I say. Everyone is looking at me, waiting. Finally, I bow to the silent pressure and hand over the necklace.

“
Merci.
” Felicity curtsies. With one quick motion she brings down the edge of the moon and slices into the pad of her finger. Blood bubbles up instantly.

“Here,” she says, streaking her blood across both of my cheeks. “We’ll mark one another. Form a pact.”

She passes the necklace to Pippa, who makes a face. “I can’t believe you want me to do this. It’s so animalistic. I hate the sight of blood.”

“Fine. I’ll do it for you, then. Shut your eyes.” Felicity breaks Pippa’s skin and Pippa screams as if she’s been mortally wounded. “Good heavens, you’re still breathing, aren’t you? Don’t be such a ninny.” Using Pippa’s fingers, she streaks the blood over Ann’s ruddy cheeks. In return, Ann wipes her bloody fingers on Pippa’s porcelain skin.

“Please hurry. I’m going to be sick. I can feel it,” Pippa whimpers.

Finally, it’s my turn. The sharp point of the moon hovers over my finger. I’m remembering a snippet of a dream—a storm, I think, and my mother screaming, my hand gaping open, wounded.

“Go on, then,” Felicity urges. “Don’t tell me I’ll have to do you, too.”

“No,” I say, and plunge the point into my finger. Pain shoots up my arm, forcing a hiss from my lips. The small crack bleeds quickly. My finger stings as I drag it softly over Felicity’s china-white cheekbones.

“There,” she says, looking around at us, newly christened in the candlelight. “Put your hands out.” She sticks out her hand and we lay our palms over hers. “We swear loyalty to each other, to keep secret the rites of our Order, to taste freedom and let no one betray us. No one.” She looks at me when she says this. “This is our sanctuary. And as long as we’re here, we will speak only truth. Swear it.”

“We swear.”

Felicity moves a candle into the center. “Let each girl tell her heart’s desire over this candle and make it so.”

Pippa takes the candle and says solemnly, “To find true love.”

“This is silly,” Ann says, trying to pass the candle to Felicity, who refuses it.

“Your heart’s desire, Ann,” she says.

Ann won’t look at any of us when she says, “To be beautiful.”

Felicity’s grip on the candle is strong, her voice determined. “I wish to be too powerful to ignore.”

Suddenly, the candle is in my hand, hot wax trickling over the sides and searing my skin before cooling into a waxy clump on my wrist. What is my heart’s desire? They want the truth, but the most truthful answer I can give is that I don’t know my own heart any better than I know theirs.

“To understand myself.”

This seems to satisfy, for Felicity intones, “O great goddesses on these walls, grant us our heart’s desires.” A breeze blows through the mouth of the cave, snuffing out the candle, making us all gasp.

“I think they heard us,” I whisper.

Pippa puts her hands to her mouth. “It’s a sign.”

Felicity passes the bottle one last time and we drink. “It seems the goddesses have answered us. To our new life. Drink up. The first meeting of the Order has come to a close. Let’s get back while our candles hold.”

I AM
POSITIVELY
DEAD
DURING
MADEMOISELLE
LeFarge’s French class the next morning. The aftereffects of whiskey are the devil himself. There isn’t a moment when my head doesn’t pound, and breakfast—dry toast with marmalade—sits precariously on the sea of my stomach.

I will never, ever drink whiskey again. From now on, it’s strictly sherry.

Pippa looks as washed out as I do. Ann seems fine—though I suspect she pretended to drink more than she did, a lesson I might heed next time. Except for the half-moon shadows under her eyes, Felicity doesn’t seem any worse for the long evening.

Elizabeth takes in the rumpled sight of me and scowls. “Whatever is the matter with her?” she says, trying to cozy up to Felicity and Pippa again. I wonder if they’ll take the bait, if last night’s friendship will be forgotten and Ann and I will find ourselves on the outside looking in once more.

“I’m afraid we cannot divulge any of the secrets of our Order,” Felicity says, giving me a furtive glance.

Elizabeth sulks and whispers to Martha, who nods. Cecily is not giving up easily, though.

“Fee, don’t be cross,” she says, oozing sweetness. “I’ve gotten new writing papers from the stationer’s. Shall we write letters home tonight in your sitting area?”